is a reverse system of metempsychosis. The old doctrine was, that the soul of a philosopher might possess the body of a donkey, but it is an altogether new-fangled thing for the spirit of a Bakewell bull or a Merino to take up its residence in the body of a doctor of divinity or that of a lecturer on Hygiene. But so it is, and it needs but a little disorder of the nerves to make the imagination teem with frightful consequences of this new faith. Only to think of our rosy-cheeked friend, the Englishman, who feeds on roast beef, in the excitement of a political argument suddenly protruding upon us the horns of an Or! Or Madame Beauvais, our vivacious and agreeable French acquaintance, getting animated into one of the frogs she loves so well! Dear old Piscator, too, who delighteth so in fishing and in eating fish, to imagine him jumping from the boat, and turning into one of his own favourite striped bass! We ourselves, though not rejoicing so much in eating fish, are fond of catching them. Yet we should be shocked at the thought of dropping line in water. Forefend us! that we should hook up our bosom friend, and salt him away for a morrow's breakfast!

But the worst of it is, that these attenuated apostles of branbred and water-cresses-whose worn-out organs can assimilate no strong meat, cannot be contented with feeding their own way (which, if it be best for them, they have our free leave to feed as they list), nor be contented with simply proselyting by example and doctrine men of their own kind, but they insist upon imposing all the pains of moral excommunication upon us who have healthy digestions and cheerful spirits, unless we will follow their examples, swear by their names, and feed by their rules.

Men must be lean, ghost-like, sepulchral,-who know not flesh at their tables. With them, to be lean is a virtue; to be fat, an abomination. If you fill your garments well, and keep a running account with the butcher, they will have an eye on you. You are not to be altogether trusted. Crimes in this code are regulated by pounds avoirdupois. "An adherence to animal food," says Hitchcock, " is no more than a persistence in the customs of savage life." We are barbarians, all. Now we put it seriously to the disciples of this creed, whether they can call to mind a well-authenticated case of murder, or any act implying brutality or cruelty of disposition, committed by a corpulent A fat murderer would be a monster. The earth could not bear him up. It is true, such a one may be an accomplice in the second or third degree; a rosy landlord, who holds the light, or a stout countryman employed to watch under a hedge

man.

VOL. I.-NO. II.

44

for the approach of the victim. It is a part of our nature, on the other hand, a Draconic law of our blood and being, that we should look upon a lean man with something of suspicion in most cases; in many, with pity and contempt. A corpulent man we may dislike or detest, but in his broad, open countenance there is something so like candour and honest living, that it would require much to bring us to believe him a villain. In no case may we despise him, or charge him reasonably with a criminal act. It is your starvelings who fill the calendar of the Sessions. It is they who commit thefts, burglaries, petit-larcenies, and other contemptible, small crimes. It is they who are seen running down streets with stray pieces of linen or pairs of pilfered Wellingtons. Who ever heard the cry "stop thief!" raised at the heels of a man who weighed two hundred and upwards? It would be an anomaly, a practical solecism, to see the hands of a constable or sheriff's officer on the collar of a coat three feet across the shoulders. It is your fat, solid men--men who know the luxury of three full meals-that make good citizens, kind fathers, tender husbands. men are all fed on beef.

These

According to the Dietetic system, food seems to be apportioned in an inverse ratio to the character and rank of the feeder. Thus, man, the noblest creature of the earth, must fatten on bran-bread and spare vegetables; while the horse, we suppose, is to feed on custards, and the right worshipful donkey on blanc-mange and ice-cream.

Charles Lamb, in one of his Essays, has an admirable battery of masked irony directed against vegetable feeders. It is a short sketch, supposed to be written by a lady (Hospita), describing a gluttonous visitor. "What makes his proceedings more particularly offensive at our house is, that my husband, though out of common politeness he is obliged to set dishes of animal food before his visitors, yet himself and his whole family (myself included) feed entirely on vegetables. We have a theory that animal food is neither wholesome nor natural to man; and even vegetables we refuse to eat until they have undergone the operation of fire, in consideration of those numberless little living creatures which the glass helps us to detect in every fibre of the plant or root before it be dressed. On the same theory we boil our water, which is our only drink, before we suffer it to come to table. Our children are perfect little Pythagoreans: it would do you good to see them in their nursery, stuffing their dried fruits, figs, raisins, and milk, which is the only approach to animal food which is allowed. They have no notion how the substance of a creature that

A beef

ever had life can become food for another creature. steak is an absurdity to them; a mutton-chop, a solecism in terms; a cutlet, a word absolutely without any meaning; a butcher is nonsense, except so far as it is taken for a man who delights in blood, or a hero. In this happy state of innocence we have kept their minds, not allowing them to go into the kitchen, or to hear of any preparations for dressing of animal food, or even to know that such things are practised. But, as a state of ignorance is incompatible with a certain age; and as my eldest girl, who is ten years old next midsummer, must shortly be introduced into the world and sit at table with us, where she will see some things which will shock all her received notions, I have been endeavouring by little and little to break her mind, and prepare it for the disageeable impressions which must be forced upon it. The first hint I gave her upon the subject, I could see her recoil from it with the same horror with which we listen to a tale of Anthropophagism; but she has gradually grown more reconciled to it in some measure from my telling her that it was the custom of the world, to which, however senseless, we must submit, so far as we could do it with innocence, not to give offence; and she has shown so much strength of mind on other occasions, which I have no doubt is owing to the calmness and serenity superinduced by her diet, that I am in good hopes that when the proper season for her debut arrives, she may be brought to endure the sight of a roasted chicken or a dish of sweet-breads, for the first time, without fainting."

We think one of the rarest spectacles in the world must be (what is called) a Graham boarding-house at about the dinner-hour. Along a table, from which, perhaps, the too elegant and gorgeous luxury of a cloth is discarded, (for we have never enjoyed the felicity of an actual vision of this kind,) seated some thirty lean-visaged, cadaverous disciples, eyeing each other askance-their looks lit up with a certain cannibal spirit, which, if there were any chance of making a full meal off each other's bones, might perhaps break into dangerous practice. The gentlemen resemble busts cut in chalk or white flint, the lady-boarders (they will pardon the allusion) mummies preserved in saffron. At the left hand of each stands a sınall tankard or pint-tumbler of cold water, or, perchance, a decoction of hot water with a little milk and sugar-(as Professor Hitchcock justly styles it)-"a harmless and salutary beverage; "-at the right, a thin segment of bran-bread. Stretched on a plate in the centre lie, melancholy twins! a pair of starveling mackerel, flanked on either side by three or four strag

gling radishes, and kept in countenance by a sorry bunch of asparagus served up without sauce. The van of the table is led by a hollow dish with a dozen potatoes, rather corpses of potatoes, in a row, lying at the bottom.

At those tables look for no conversation, or for conversation of the driest and dullest sort. Small wit is begotten of spare viands. They, however, think otherwise. "Vegetable food," says the sagacious Hitchcock, "tends to preserve a delicacy of feeling, a liveliness of imagination, and acuteness of judgment seldom enjoyed by those who live principally on meat." Green peas, cabbage, and spinnet are enrolled in a new catalogue. They are no longer culinary and botanical. They take rank above that. They are become metaphysical, and have a rare operation that way; they "tend to preserve a delicacy of feeling," &c. Cauliflower is a power of the mind; and asparagus, done tenderly, is nothing less than a mental faculty of the first order. "Butter'd parsnips" are, no doubt, a great help in education; and a course of vegetables, we presume, is to be substituted at college in the place of the old routine of Greek and Latin classics. The student will be henceforth pushed forward through his academic studies by rapid stages of Lima beans, parsley, and tomato. Very good. We like your novelties in education. Nothing could certainly be more original, or more happily thought of, than a diet of greens for Freshmen and Sophomores, and (you must have something expensive and brilliant there), a regimen of sunflowers and pumpkin for the elder classes. We like this vastly. This is metempsychosis again. The "soul of Socrates might take up its residence in a stocking weaver," as the doctrine used to stand; but now, better still, a man may go out into the fields and cull just such a soul as he chooses, in the same way as you select a coat in a tailor's shop or a glove at the hosier's. He has a free range of faculties to draw upon. If he finds his sympathies begin to flag from too much use, or to soil from contact with the rude world, let him but step into his garden and gather a few of those vegetables "which tend to preserve a delicacy of feeling." We have here also a new specific for the composition of Shakspeares, Miltons, and Byrons. Poets are now to be turned into the meadow, and prepared for the production of a tragedy or epic just as you fat a prize ox or piece of mutton. Such feeding tends to preserve a "liveliness of imagination." Statesmen and lawyers, who require "acuteness of judgment," will henceforward graduate on potherbs from the kitchen-garden. Sir Walter Scott must have been

altogether at fault in the opinion expressed in the Autobiographical fragment-prefixed to the Life. "After one or two relapses," says he, speaking of an illness he had suffered from, "my constitution recovered the injury it had sustained, though for several months afterwards I was restricted to a severe vegetable diet. And I must say in passing, that though I gained health under this necessary restriction, yet it was far from being agreeable to me; and I was afflicted, while under its influence, with a nervousness which I never felt before nor since. A disposition to start upon slight alarms--a want of decision in feeling and acting, which has not usually been my failing-an acute sensibility to trifling inconveniencesand an unnecessary apprehension of contingent misfortunes rise to memory as connected with my vegetable diet, although they may very possibly have been entirely the result of the disorder and not of the cure." It is clear, however, which way he leaned, although he speaks in the most guarded language. It will be observed, that he attributed to vegetable diet a peculiar malady, for which, the dietetic professors assert, it is a most admirable specific.

The most lamentable aspect of the system and teachings of these apostles of improved dietetics, is that which regards its moral character and influence. Not content with a total revolution of the whole world by the aid of abstinence and fasting, they would turn the same engines towards heaven, and with them impiously, perhaps ignorantly impious, batter down the established muniments of Gospel, Morals and Truth. Not satisfied with the operations of their specific on mind and body, they would incorporate their wild fantasies in the moral code, and place the dogma of an itinerant lecturer at the head of the commandments. These men have interleaved the Bible, and, scrawling their own absurd texts and comments upon the blank pages, put forth an improved version of the Book of God.

They would turn all the denunciations of Scripture against the single sin of inordinate indulgence of the appetite: they would make repletion the Anti-Christ, and prove that penal fires and scorchings of conscience are prepared for him who dares partake in liberal measure of the gifts and bounties of Heaven. All things in the two testaments are, in the misty fancies of these fanatical dreamers, typical of intemperance in eating.

Thus, in the book of Numbers occurs the following passage: "So they did eat and were filled, for he gave them their own desire; they were not estranged from their lust;